Tibco Drops 15%: FYQ1 Revenue Misses; Q2 View Misses

By Tiernan Ray

Shares of enterprise software vendor Tibco (TIBX) are down $2.57, or 11%, at $20.60, after the company this afternoon reportedfiscal Q1 revenue that missed analysts’ estimates, and profit per share in line with consensus.

Revenue in the three months ended in February rose 5%, year over year, to $238 million, yielding EPS of 18 cents.

Analysts had been modeling $242 million and 18 cents.

CEO Vivek Ranadive remarked,

We remain very focused on continuing the changes we initiated last year to improve our execution. I believe we are making the right moves to steady our performance and deliver our next leg of growth. Our competitive differentiation remains strong, and we are well positioned to benefit from the current trends driving enterprise IT spending, such as ‘big data,’ especially with our event-driven platform approach to integrating and analyzing data in real-time.

Update: On the call, management forecast Q2 revenue in a range of $242 million to $252 million, and EPS in a range of 17 cents to 19 cents. That is below the consensus for $265 million and 25 cents profit per share.

Tibco stock is now down $3.42, or almost 15%, at $19.76.

Update 2: In a phone chat following the conference call, Ranadive took some time to tell me what is working and not working for the company.

“The appetite for what we do continues to be very, very strong, better than it’s ever been,” said Ranadive. He blamed softness in license revenue on failure to execute sufficiently.

“The weakness was in our execution in certain parts of the Americas, and certain parts of Northern Europe. We’ve been going through changes of leadership in our sales organization.

He added,

There’s three things to do. One is to change some of the players in the sales division. We changed the head of North American sales, and he changed some of those under him. Number two is to make sure we are giving the right kinds of processes to the sales engine. And number three is to learn from the results what we need to adjust.

Despite the shortfall, Ranadive pointed out the company had more deals of $100,000 or more in value than it had in the same period a year earlier. And he cited “pockets of strength” in the results, such as sales of product aimed at “big data” projects, where revenue was up 37% from the prior-year period.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.